Awareness: Cyber Harassment
I recently wrote about Cyber Harassment on my personal blog called Millennial Garden. I don’t see a lot of talk about Cyber Harassment in the Gen Y blogs so I thought it would be a good topic to discuss. The following is a high-level overview, which identifies the terms Cyber Bullying, Cyber Stalking, and Cyber Harassment. Please leave your thoughts on this social blogging issue. If you have a story to share to raise awareness, please leave feedback in the comments.
What is Cyber Bullying?
Cyber Bullying is terminology that describes the harassment of or by a child or teenager on the internet. There’s a website that talks more about this called Stop Stop Cyberbullying. Visit here to learn about what a cyber bully is, prevention techniques, and how to take action.
What is Cyber Stalking?
Cyber stalking or cyberstalking is online harassment. Cyberstalkers use the internet or electronic methods to intimidate or harass. Not every conflict on the internet is cyberstalking. An offensive email, blog, chat, or argument is not necessarily harassment.
Overview from The National Center for Victims of Crime
Cyberstalking is a relatively new phenomenon. With the decreasing expense and thereby increased availability of computers and online services, more individuals are purchasing computers and “logging onto” the Internet, making another form of communication vulnerable to abuse by stalkers.
Cyberstalkers target their victims through chat rooms, message boards, discussion forums, and e-mail. Cyberstalking takes many forms such as: threatening or obscene e-mail; spamming (in which a stalker sends a victim a multitude of junk e-mail); live chat harassment or flaming (online verbal abuse); leaving improper messages on message boards or in guest books; sending electronic viruses; sending unsolicited e-mail; tracing another person’s computer and Internet activity, and electronic identity theft.
Similar to stalking off-line, online stalking can be a terrifying experience for victims, placing them at risk of psychological trauma, and possible physical harm. Many cyberstalking situations do evolve into off-line stalking, and a victim may experience abusive and excessive phone calls, vandalism, threatening or obscene mail, trespassing, and physical assault.
What type of people cyber harass?
According to Wired Safety,
Cyberstalkers are often driven by revenge, hate, anger, jealousy, obsession and mental illness. While a cyberharasser may be motivated by some of these same feelings, often the harassment is driven by the desire to frighten or embarrass the harassment victim.
Sometimes the harasser intends to teach the victim a lesson in netiquette or political correctness (from the harasser’s point of view). Often the cyberharassment victim is merely in the wrong place at the wrong time, or has made a comment or expressed an opinion that the cyberharasser dislikes. We have even seen cases where the victim is merely being targeted because they are the first ones the cyberharasser encounters when they are in a “bad mood.
Do you have a Cyber Harassment story to share with us to help raise awareness on this issue?
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Cyberharassment need not be kid to kid. My 50 plus year old ex and his wife of 5 years have formed what he calls a “camp”; a group of online people he has joined together to insult and share false accusations against me. He even tried to recruit my new husband, friends, family, and my children. When my new husband refused to join the alliance, they began insulting him and accusing him also. When my 85 year old mother refused to buy into their game, she was shunned by my niece who joined his camp. Even though these were all real life people, the alienation was all done online. From emails accusing me of stealing tens of thousands of dollars during our marriage, to threatening to take away my children’s tax returns, to writing emails to my family to advertise for “camp” recruitments, he’s been working nonstop since my new marriage (for a year and a half), trying to alienate us from our friends and family. He succeeded in gathering one daughter of mine, a son-in-law, a brother, niece, and sister-in-law. He never succeeded with any of our friends. The rest of the 20 plus members of my family, my three other children, and my friends have been even closer than ever because of this.
The peak of his immaturity showed up in Myspace a few months or so ago when his wife found some of my posts in online support groups by cyberstalking. She put them on display in her Myspace homepage blogs. They opened up their homepage for family and friends to see the insults, slanders and accusation that they posted on my husband and I. From there they carried on conversations with his wife’s friends, my daughter and son-in-law about assumptions and twisted meanings to my posts that they found through cyberstalking.
If you keep a sense of humor about it, cyberharassment is much more tolerable. My other three children left Myspace one by one because of the harassment strategies. He didn’t stop until I completely closed my own Myspace account, blocked him out of every email account that I had, including my professional email through a state network. Yes, it was necessary. He contacted me in every way he could except he would not contact me face to face or in real life.
Be proactive. I went to my boss in case his accusations made their way into my profession. I went to the local police department and had two officers visit their Myspace blogs during periodic intervals (just for the record). I sent every email and blog to my attorneys and I informed everyone I knew as to what was going on. With two hundred pages of emails going both ways, Myspace blogs, online comments, and a journal I kept that recorded contact they had that was out of the ordinary to others, and recording my own correspondences with professionals and authorities, I did what I could to feel empowered against him. Though he still got his rush from cyberbullying, I felt as though I had some control with my proactive strategy. That may not have influenced the situation but it was good for me to feel as though I had the situation under control by being this proactive.
As far as getting these bullies to stop? Ignore them. They want a reaction, no matter what it is. Any and all reactions just make them bully worse. It doesn’t matter if it’s a kind or cruel reaction. The cyberbully needs that rush.
I finally got a clue and left every site that he knew I was on then blocked him from everything else. Since then it’s been a freedom undescribed.
The only thing you can do is be proactive by creating a paper trail, than remove yourself in any way you can from the online connections. Appealing to a bully only makes it worse. Defending yourself only makes it worse. Being exceptionally kind only makes it worse. Laughing makes them furious. Forgiving and forgetting only makes it worse. Ignoring them and trying to be civilized only makes it worse. The worse thing you can do out of all there is to do is to try to reason with them. There is no reasoning with them. There is absolutely nothing that will work with this kind of mentality, except to disappear.
I suggest you disappear.
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